I am a chemical engineer who has been using Mathcad for about 20 years, probably version 2 or 3 as the first. I use other specialized software for things like process simulation, fluid flow CFD etc., but when I need something special, Mathcad is the tool I use. In fact, once I learned Mathcad, I stopped using other programming languages like Fortran, or any of the Visual languages (C, Basic....). I've used Mathcad for a wide range of chemical engineering problems, from reactors, sprays, pipelines, optimization, stochastic simulation, dynamic models of reactors....and on.

So why, when I do a search for topics with chemical engineering and Mathcad, do I find so little. There are some professors who've posted some example problems, but very little else. Matlab is being used a lot by chemists and ChE's, but it can't compete with Mathcad, in my opinion, mainly because of the code look and the lack of symbolic solutions. I also don't see much interesting in the PTC Community regarding ChE.

PTC must must not be trying hard enough to sell into the ChE community? Are they concentrating too much on CAD design, i.e. mechanical engineering?

One suggestion to appeal to ChE's would be to incorporate an add-in that provided physical properties, including vapor-liquid-liquid equilibrium constants. There are a couple of packages that could be easily linked in to Mathcad if you have the C++ and Visual Studio knowhow. But that is only one suggestion. What ideas doe others have, and do you agree that there needs to be more attention to ChE as a market?

I don't think it's so much of a case as "PTC must must not be trying hard enough to sell into the ChE community?". As a prior Mathcad Product Manager, I think we (PTC) would be happy with any sales, just like any software vendor would! Kidding aside - I think a subsection of engineers and techical professionals saw applicability for Mathcad sooner (or in greater numbers) than others did, and micro-communities sprung up around them. The volume of posts on Mathsoft's prior 'collab' was a testament to that. We ported over much of that content here.

PlanetPTC Community, here, is a place for just that. So a solution to "So why, when I do a search for topics with chemical engineering and Mathcad, do I find so little. " is to get a sub-community up nd running, or add to one that is already started. And then help promote it - let other professionals like yourself know that this is a place to come and have like-minded discussions around chemcial engineering and how Mathcad plays role in your everyday work.

I asked a question in the same vein a number of years ago, namely why no Mathcad Chemical Engineering electronic library was ever produced. The answer was put succinctly by the old Collab Jean Giraud (jmg) that there was just too much to inlcude, although Samir Khan went some way to producing one but never quite finished it, making an admirable contribution of Chemical Engineering worksheets on the way.

I think the answers to your question are a bit more subtle.

There will always be a biase from the PTC contributors towards their own discipline background and I am guessing here as I have no information to prove it, that the present PTC set up is more non-Chemical Engineering disciplined. The likes of Samir who as a Chemical Engineer worked for a UK Mathcad distributor at the time, and indeed trained me in the use of Mathcad, have I guess disappeared from the PTC/distributor set-up.

Also I believe a lot of the old Collabs who were Chemical Engineering orientated have left the scene, although a lot of what appeared under the umbrella of the Chemical Engineering forum was actually related directly to Chemistry with no relevance to the former.

The simple answer may be that Chemical Engineering calculations only use the basics of Mathcad and therefore Chemical Engineers have not required the help. Indeed over the years a lot of my own work has used little of the resources of Mathcad, although this may have been due to the requirements that my cleints had to understand a pdf copy of my Mathcad calcs and even a simple use of the Mathcad programming formatting left them wondering what I was doing (from real experiences). So for me the simpler the calculation format the better.

I see you are a new member of this forum since March 2011, but you have obviously been using Mathcad for a long time and yet you have never in all that time required any help from Mathsoft or PTC. If that is the case then does it not answer your own question?

Danny, thanks for your reply. Your analysis is pretty much in line with my suspicions regarding the corporate background and strengths. As Alan suggested, maybe some of us ChE's can help get the ball rolling.

Your last observation about my not needing help with PTC in this forum is correct, but it does not answer my question. When I said I found little in searches for Che and Mathcad topics, I had in mind published papers on the web that mention Mathcad models, not discussions in PlanetPTC. I see a lot more papers that have Matlab models than Mathcad. Also, I retired from ConocoPhillips and Matlab is more in use there than Mathcad. That is a shame because I believe Mathcad is so much better. The natural documentation alone is reason to use Mathcad.

Regarding the keeping it simple comments you made about others not understanding Mathcad. I can't imagine what other programming option you use for the complex calculations that is easier to understand than Mathcad. Yes, there are some functions in Mathcad that might need a few extra comments, but in large it is just math as you would find in any text. When I have symbolic solutions that extend beyond the page (some go for many pages) or large "programs" using the programming tools, I just hide those sections in the model and then describe what has taken place in the hidden section. This is no different than journal papers because not every equation and operation is shown there either. The same approach might be used to avoid showing the unknown functions.

I started this discussion mainly with the hope of finding ways to make Mathcad either more attractive to ChE's or to find ways to better market it to ChE's. Satisfying that quest may be difficult in this forum because we who use it don't see any problems. But maybe you have some colleagues that can say what they don't like.

First let me apologise for the multiple entries of my last reply but my computer was telling me it was not successful so I continued to try and send the reply before I checked to find it had been successful - many times!

I have no experience of Matlab or its capabilities so I cannot really comment on your observations in published papers, which I rarely need anyway since the clients of my present employer have most things tied up in specifications.

You hit it on the nail for me when you said the "natural documentation alone is reason to use Mathcad".

I can only re-iterate that unfortunately some clients I have encountered have been confused with simple Mathcad programming tools appearing in a calculation. As to symbolic solutions I rarely use them or even need them.

As to expanding the use of Mathcad I am afraid I find the younger Chemical Engineers I presently work with have shown no interest at all. It is the case that all seven of my present younger colleagues (I am the eldest by far) have squarely rejected the use of Mathcad and prefer to use Excel. I have tried to introduce Mathcad but without any success. My present employer provides access to both Mathcad and Excel, but the use of the former is exclusively in Mechanical and Structural disciplines.

Also being trained to use a peice of software is one thing but you need to be given time to develop the use of the software to suit your specific needs and this needs corporate funding not on the job client funding.

I have had several mentored Chemical Engineering undergraduates with a previous employer go on to use Mathcad in their subsequent employment. I think the latter indicates that if you get them early enough, i.e. at university or work related mentoring, then your chances of influencing their future use of Mathcad is increased substantially - I am sure PTC already know this.

You hit it on the nail for me when you said the "natural documentation alone is reason to use Mathcad".

I can only re-iterate that unfortunately some clients I have encountered have been confused with simple Mathcad programming tools appearing in a calculation. As to symbolic solutions I rarely use them or even need them.

I agree with this. I have only ever used symbolic's to check my calculations done on paper.

As to expanding the use of Mathcad I am afraid I find the younger Chemical Engineers I presently work with have shown no interest at all. It is the case that all seven of my present younger colleagues (I am the eldest by far) have squarely rejected the use of Mathcad and prefer to use Excel. I have tried to introduce Mathcad but without any success. My present employer provides access to both Mathcad and Excel, but the use of the former is exclusively in Mechanical and Structural disciplines.

Also being trained to use a peice of software is one thing but you need to be given time to develop the use of the software to suit your specific needs and this needs corporate funding not on the job client funding.

Young engineers tend to lean on Excel because that's what they know. I work in the Subsea Oil and Gas sector and a lot of graduates come in and don't know how to use any Mathematical software except Excel. I tend to jump straight on to them and indicate what Mathcad is capable of, which is much more than Excel.

Yes you do need time, but if the individual is committed enough they will teach themselves as I had to. It all depends on how much they want it.

I don't know a single person who has made the transition from Excel to Mathcad and then turned back.

I think the latter indicates that if you get them early enough, i.e. at university or work related mentoring, then your chances of influencing their future use of Mathcad is increased substantially - I am sure PTC already know this.

I have had this discussion before that PTC need to push Mathcad onto Universities, but the problem is Matlab has already got there in most cases.

With my previous employer I mentored several Chemical Engineering undergraduates (one at a time) during their year out from respective UK universities, and I always assumed they knew little of anything even associated with Excel - not that I am a power user either. Excel was the company 'standard mathematical' spreadsheet software and therefore I had no option but to use it and to train the undergraduates in the use of template spreadsheets.

However I was also the only UK Engineer to use Mathcad so as you do I introduced them to the latter and this proved very successful. I explained that essentially working alone I needed to have the confidence that my design calculations were at least logically (mathematically speaking) correct and Mathcad did that for me - I could then concentrate more on getting things technically correct.

I had used Mathcad for seven years before I received the formal training I previously mentioned and as you indicated above if a person is interested enough then self teaching is entirely possible with Mathcad.

Your point about reverting from Mathcad back to Excel is quite ironic as indeed that is exactly what I have had to do at my present employer due to the lack of interest from my younger colleagues. I have been finding the lack of good company Excel templates - i.e. not user friendly or riddled with errors, such that I take particular interest in checking Excel calculations from my colleagues and contrary to Harvey's comments about diminishing peer review it is very necessary these days - maybe it is just my age gap with my present colleagues is clouding my view!!

One of my colleagues is furthering his education with an MEng at a UK university and only a couple of weeks ago he told me he is having a course on Matlab - in line with your findings. I shall be interested to see what he learns about the application of Matlab to our daily work.

I was taught Fortran in my final year at school and at university (the latter as an additional 10week lunchtime course during my first year). I went on to use Fortran in my first job for engineering calculations on and off over almost 12years, but after an intensive two year period of little sleep I decided to step back from writing Fortran for a living and indeed I have not written any since that employment.

My present use of Mathcad reflects this personal unwillingness to delve too deeply into computing and thankfully Mathcad does lend itself to being used at various levels.

However I do still use Mathcad occasionally and recently I used Mathcad calculations to show a high profile engineering company that calculation examples in one of their company specification were incorrect.

As I said previously I am sure PTC are aware that universities are the key to introducing future engineers to Mathcad.

Your point about reverting from Mathcad back to Excel is quite ironic as indeed that is exactly what I have had to do at my present employer due to the lack of interest from my younger colleagues. I have been finding the lack of good company Excel templates - i.e. not user friendly or riddled with errors, such that I take particular interest in checking Excel calculations from my colleagues and contrary to Harvey's comments about diminishing peer review it is very necessary these days - maybe it is just my age gap with my present colleagues is clouding my view!!

Rather you than me. Some engineers do still use Excel and unless for formulas are shown I find it very frustrating and time consuming checking their calculations.

One of my colleagues is furthering his education with an MEng at a UK university and only a couple of weeks ago he told me he is having a course on Matlab - in line with your findings. I shall be interested to see what he learns about the application of Matlab to our daily work.

I have recently started to teach myself Matlab, but I still can't see me changing from Mathcad. I like the interaction I have with PTC. I have been testing the new products and can guarantee that they have been listening to what users wants. So your suggestions are not going unheard.

The same thing happened to me about the multiple postings...guess I need to report it as a bug.

Yes, what you have to say is discouraging. Basicly, what I have seen over the years is that new engineers don't want to use math or write programs, they want canned programs to do everything. That would be nice, but still not realistic.

Your comments about your clients having difficulty reading simple Mathcad programs is really a puzzle. If they can't read that, then what is easier to read? It's certainly not Excel, or at least most Excel programs that haven't defined variables. I've written models in Fortran, and they too are not as easy to understand as Mathcad. Is it possible that your clients are going to have a problem understanding any program, not just Mathcad?

This leads to another change that has ocurred over the years. At least within companies, maybe not with intra-company clients, there is less peer review and less management quality control. No one checks anyone's work any more. Maybe that is because I eventually became the "expert" and management just trusted me to get the right answer. However, it doesn't seem like there is as much oversight with newer employees either. With no oversight, Excel is fine because no one else has to be able to read and understand it. With all of the Six Sigma and other quality control initiatives, it would seem that management would insist on better documentation and peer reviews. If they did, I still maintain that Mathcad would be the predominant choice for scientific modeling.

So why am I interested in this topic. One of my consulting specialties is reactor development, design, and modeling. If there were more ChE's using Mathcad, it would increase client acceptance of my Mathcad models. Also it might open up opportunities to teach a reactor design course with Mathcad as the program tool. Sounds like you might have similar interests in improving the acceptance of Mathcad as a modeling tool by your clients.

You said you rarely use symbolic solutions. I frequently use them, some times it's probably the only way I could have solved the problem. I don't use the symbolic solution for just publication purposes like an academic would use them. They are often an intermediate result that gets assigned a function name, and then the function is used as a term in an ODE or PDE. For me symbolic solution capability is the "killer" capability that Matlab and most progamming languages don't have. I read an article the other day that said that a certain variable couldn't be solved symbolicly in the given equation. Mathcad found the answer...about 4 pages wide.

I'm not going to give up this crusade yet! I'm thinking of ways that might help the situation. Your comments about getting to the younger people is probably critical. I'm going to think about what we can do to help that situation.

Sorry for the length, but it is nice to be talking to others that are in the same boat.

I started this discussion mainly with the hope of finding ways to make Mathcad either more attractive to ChE's or to find ways to better market it to ChE's. Satisfying that quest may be difficult in this forum because we who use it don't see any problems.

I can't agree with this. I find the biggest critics of Mathcad are the people who use it. I do a lot of testing for Mathcad and openly state when I have a problem and so do others of this and the old forum.

Thanks for the link to the group for the proposed improvements. I'm still gathering ideas and doing more thinking about this, before I send in proposals. The discussions have been good so far, for me anyway. I think we are going to find that Mathcad doesn't need much changes, but that there could be some different approaches in changing the culture in the marketplace. Some of this may be for PTC but some of the burden may fall to the customer, at least to customers like me who want a bigger acceptance of Mathcad models for my business.

I hope you stay tuned and keep in the discussion. I wish there were more contributors but that may be a symptom of the subject of the discussion.

...The likes of Samir who as a Chemical Engineer worked for a UK Mathcad distributor at the time, and indeed trained me in the use of Mathcad, have I guess disappeared from the PTC/distributor set-up...

There have been several suggestions that we need to get a better presence in the universities. That may be true, but the competition might not be Excel and Matlab at that level. Aspen Tech has a high presence with Aspen Plus and Hysys academic licenses. I'm afraid that many young engineers learn the process simulation tools, or CFD tools, in college and think they will be the only tools they need. When they are on the job, they eventually find out that those tools can't solve all problems. They then try to fill in with whatever else they find. Like, Excel, it's everywhere. Beyond Excel, we have Mathcad and Matlab, primarily. At this point, I think the corporate culture and "standards" make the difference. Let me give an example.

When I was working for Phillips Petroleum, the company acquired the Alaska holdings of Arco. Most of the Arco Alaska employees became Phillips employees. Several years later, I was able to do a search of the Mathcad licenses in Phillips. Most of the licenses were in Alaska offices because the Arco employees used Mathcad. Phillips had some users, like me, but it was obvious that there was a difference in use between the two companies. While I was still employed at Phillips, I don't recall there being a corporate decision to choose between Mathcad, Matlab or other similar programs. However, there was a corporate decision to make Aspen the preferred process simulation tool. Hysys remained in some areas due to existing models, but new growth went to Aspen. I don't know about Arco, but it's possible that Arco may have made a corporate decision in favor of Mathcad as a general computation tool, thus explaining why it was in high use there.

The lesson is that selling high up the corporate ladder works. At first I didn't like the fact that some manager made a choice for my tools, but there is something for efficiency in maintenance, training, collaboration, standards.

PTC already knows the selling points for Mathcad: quality control, documentation, peer review, automatic units conversion and checking, collaboration ease. I saw a video on the PTC site that compared the readability of a Mathcad equation to an Excel equation. That video needs to include a comparison of Mathcad, Matlab, Fortran and C++ programs that model the same computation. I would make the computation more than one equation...like maybe a reactor model. Then, PTC needs to take that video on the road to the "upper floors" of the corporate offices. If the sales person works in the appropriate Six Sigma or other quality lingo, the sale should be easy.

How about this for a sales demo? Have a panel of engineers, each knowing how to program in at least one of the languages mentioned above. Give them each a copy of a program model written in their preferred language. Ask them to write down the equations in the program using traditional math notation. Show the Matlab, Excel, Fortran and C++ engineers madly working away. Pan to the Mathcad expert, who is merely handing back the Mathcad program, with the equations. (OK Danny, your peers may have had some problems with the special functions, like Rkadapt (,,,,), but the test could avoid those issues and still make a point.)

PTC is undoubtedly trying to sell to corporate high management, but I haven't seen the side-by-side comparisons with Mathcad and anything other than Excel. I could have missed it...this is a big site.

Excel has been mentioned as the major competition for Mathcad. My guess is that is true in companies that have not really selected an alternative to Excel. Matlab is probably big in companies that have chosen it at a corporate level, same with Mathcad. In major companies, I think many engineers just assume they are to use whatever is available and not ask for something better, particularly today. Thus, Excel is big because it comes in MS Office. Fortunately, I got started with Mathcad because I asked and Phillips provided. Sales grow slowly, one-at-a-time.

I've thought of some other things that might help the product, but this is enough to chew on for now.

I have been unable to get time until now to add a last comment from me on this matter - I shall follow your blog from now on - but I feel I must add a response in defense of the Excel community.

Having to revert to Excel over the past three or four years I have found several sources of very useful chemical engineering knowledge and freely available spreadsheets. There are a couple of websites in particular which I believe for some people and for specific disciplines will offer a more than adequate knowledge and free spreadsheet base.

For Chemical Engineering the Cheresources.com forums provide plenty of technical know how and spreadsheets, and has stalwarts like Art Motemayor to guide the less experienced. The benefit of this website is that there is plenty of chemical engineering discussion going on as well as the request for spreadsheets - chemical engineering discussion was never a great strength of even the old Mathcad Collaboratory and certainly not of todays revamp.

For other disciplines then MoreVision's exelcalcs.com website is proving very popular and John Doyle has admirably discussed the benefits of Excel over Mathcad in this forum. They also provide spreadsheets although most are related to civil, structural and mechanical engineering. The XLC add-in allowing formulae to be displayed can be all that is required by a lot of people at least for presentation and checking purposes - strong points for me personally - and of course strong points for also using Mathcad, but your example was spot on as I had never heard of "Rkadapt" until I started using Mathcad and the clients I have to deal with in contracting had no idea what this or similar Mathcad solvers are all about.

You mentioned the furthering of AspenTech and their simulation software including HYSYS and FlareNet both of which I use on an irregular basis, and indeed it is the latter point which is the crux in respect of this type of software. As you rightly said too many chemical engineering graduates having been exposed to AspenTech simulation software at universities think it is all they need in the outside world, only to quickly be brought back to earth (in Process Contracting at least) when they are asked to do their first line sizing - usually using an Excel spreadsheet. Simulation software has it's place but it is not the tool for everyday chemical engineering if for no other reason that the cost of the software is in a different league to the likes of Excel - not sure about Mathcad.

I have been unable to get time until now to add a last comment from me on this matter - I shall follow your blog from now on - but I feel I must add a response in defense of the Excel community.

Having to revert to Excel over the past three or four years I have found several sources of very useful chemical engineering knowledge and freely available spreadsheets. There are a couple of websites in particular which I believe for some people and for specific disciplines will offer a more than adequate knowledge and free spreadsheet base.

For Chemical Engineering the Cheresources.com forums provide plenty of technical know how and spreadsheets, and has stalwarts like Art Motemayor to guide the less experienced. The benefit of this website is that there is plenty of chemical engineering discussion going on as well as the request for spreadsheets - chemical engineering discussion was never a great strength of even the old Mathcad Collaboratory and certainly not of todays revamp.

For other disciplines then MoreVision's exelcalcs.com website is proving very popular and John Doyle has admirably discussed the benefits of Excel over Mathcad in this forum. They also provide spreadsheets although most are related to civil, structural and mechanical engineering. The XLC add-in allowing formulae to be displayed can be all that is required by a lot of people at least for presentation and checking purposes - strong points for me personally - and of course strong points for also using Mathcad, but your example was spot on as I had never heard of "Rkadapt" until I started using Mathcad and the clients I have to deal with in contracting had no idea what this or similar Mathcad solvers are all about.

You mentioned the furthering of AspenTech and their simulation software including HYSYS and FlareNet both of which I use on an irregular basis, and indeed it is the latter point which is the crux in respect of this type of software. As you rightly said too many chemical engineering graduates having been exposed to AspenTech simulation software at universities think it is all they need in the outside world, only to quickly be brought back to earth (in Process Contracting at least) when they are asked to do their first line sizing - usually using an Excel spreadsheet. Simulation software has it's place but it is not the tool for everyday chemical engineering if for no other reason that the cost of the software is in a different league to the likes of Excel - not sure about Mathcad.

As a ChE graduate student (back in the day - version 1 or 2) I made extensive use of Mathcad with the encouragement of one of my professors. We had a friendly competition based on who could come up with the most elegant Mathcad solutions to homework problems in Advanced Thermodynamics. I used it here and there in other classes, but mostly to check my work, since most of my other profs wouldn't accept (or didn't trust) Mathcad generated work papers. I still found it useful and even located a typo in Bird, Stewart, and Lightfoot that could not have been discovered with hand calculations. However, none of my colleagues seemed to catch on to how powerful Mathcad was for these types of calculations.

Many years later, my son is now enrolled at a major university in ChE. The students are all provided with "enterprise" use (or severely reduced cost licenses) of a standard set of software to use. This collection includes MatLab and Excel, but not Mathcad. This certainly has something to do with the proliferation of MatLab and Excel into the ChE community.

I have for some time bemoaned the lack of ChE references and handbooks as Mathcad e-books. I think they don't exist because the task is daunting as a public effort and would provide little revenue to a commercial effort. Can you imagine trying to capture Perry's handbook as an e-book? The width and breadth of ChE technical material is daunting, to say the least. Additionally, the publishers of ChE texts are probably just not interested in seeing their work in an electronic form, especially when they can charge what they do for texts (what does a Perry's handbook cost these days?).

So in summary, I see two major hurdles in getting Mathcad into the ChE mainstream:

Creative (and competitive) licensing of Mathcad at the university level and finding ChE professors/departments willing to be champions

Major hurdles of time investment and publisher resistance to e-book version of standard ChE handbooks

It's up to PTC to do something about #1. I think the engineering community has to be willing to invest the time, money, and effort into #2. It's a pickle. Maybe Harvey's Blog is the place to start. More of us ChE's who have seen the light need to be willing to go out and evangelize for Mathcad.

I agree with hurdle 1 but only partially with hurdle 2. Having some additional tables of information from Perry's Hbk would be helpful at times, but that deficit holds true for the Mathcad competitors also. So it isn't a reason that Mathcad is used less than another tool, such as Matlab or Excel.

I may be old fashioned, but I don't go looking for pre-built worksheets to do the many small computations that need to be done. I like to build them myself so I know better how they work. Maybe, if there were a single e-book I might change that way of working, but it's not a big issue with me. I'm putting some of my worksheets on this site more for examples of what can be done and the value of doing it than for providing an alternative to an e-book.

The one, biggest aid we could use with Mathcad is a thermophysical property package with both data (thermo, VLLE, transport properties) and with a good set of flash routines including liq/liq/vap equilibrium. I've seen a couple of packages that work with Matlab and Excel. In the future, I plan to work with PTC to get something similar. Yes, I know I could build the flash routines myself in Mathcad, so that is not extremely critical. What is critical is to get the parameter values, like a DIPPR database, that can be accessed by Mathcad easily. Without this capability, engineers must try to do their work in a process simulation program or with the packages mentioned above. Yes, there are a lot of problems that don't involve VLLE, but people don't like program hopping.

Thanks for your comments. They have stimulated some additional thinking on my part. I have some research to do before I comment further, but stay tuned. I think the new ideas I have will be a new thread, so please continue to watch the Chemical Engineering space.

There were a couple of attempts to incorporate Mathcad into (chemical) engineering teaching books. The one that springs to mind is the Schaum's series of Interactive Outlines which included 'Fluid Mechanics & Hydraulics' and 'Thermodynamics for Engineers' both of which incorporated Mathcad examples. Obviously I don't know the commercial success of these specific books but with the overall success of Schaum's books they would be near the top of my list on collaboration.

There were a couple of attempts to incorporate Mathcad into (chemical) engineering teaching books. The one that springs to mind is the Schaum's series of Interactive Outlines which included 'Fluid Mechanics & Hydraulics' and 'Thermodynamics for Engineers' both of which incorporated Mathcad examples. Obviously I don't know the commercial success of these specific books but with the overall success of Schaum's books they would be near the top of my list on collaboration.

My apologies for not listing your references. Unfortunately in 30+ years all of my work has been related to detailed (Chemical) Process Engineering and not to empirical Chemical Engineering, so references I have used initially come to mind. Unfortunately my maths, though once my best subject, is all but a lost memory and thankfully does not need to be anywhere near the level you and your co-author have generously exhibited in your stated reference.